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Mario DiPaolantino

situation of complete equality and sameness, where the distillation of thenation's norms can be crystallized and sealed. To bring the incomprehen-sible crimes before the law thus provides a retrospective lesson on thefounding values of the nation. The "facts" and the "truth" that would begot from the traumatic event were ultimately to serve in separating andthus abjecting the "false" and "aberrant" values of Argentine identityfrom the "true" and "original" ones. In this sense, the will to come to termswith the past, to make the trauma into an object of knowledge, reveals thedesire in the formation of a redeemed national identity: an opportunity forself-confirmation, a history lesson on "who we really are."This retrospective artifice had an incredible force in the "officialnarrativization" of the "dirty war," for it was from behind this "veil ofignorance" and through its implicit consensual process that the law wouldprovide a record that could "distinguish dispassionately the legitimateaims of the anti-terrorist campaign from the illegitimate means adoptedfor its realization" (Osiel "Making" 155). Working from these presump-tions, there was no room for the trial to consider the whole "anti-terroristcampaign" as being itself wholly "illegitimate" and as a means toinstitutionalize class war through the force of the state, for this wouldhave breached the discursive framework ushered by the process ofnational recovery and reconciliation. Hence, the trial "steered clear ofjudging the legitimacy of the junta as a government or its decision tocombat subversion, [the court] confined itself to judging the defendantsfor the commission of well established crimes and struggled to make theproceeding resemble an average criminal trial" (Speck 494).9Because the boundaries within which the criminal case organizes itsdeliberation of the "facts" assumes that behind the "veil of ignorance" allare equal-that the social differences of race, class, gender, and religionare unimportant-the trial produced a decidedly historically discon-nected and individualized narrative of the event. As Carina Perelliobserves, "The collective dimension of repression tended to be lost in thisbleak recitation of individual pain and despair" (435). Because theextensive documentation of kidnappings, murders, and torture werepresented without any deliberate attempt at formulating the connectionsbetween them, a despairingly discrete picture was drawn ofa process thatwas ultimately methodical and ontologically driven in its selection ofvictims. In not considering the broader social milieu, "the trial failed toprovide an outlet for the feeling of personal inadequacy, anger, andfrustration repressed during the years of extreme individualization, underthe culture of fear" (435). The trial was particularly vexing, for although